


Perception Check

by LaurelCrowned



Category: The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Amnesia, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:27:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22884019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaurelCrowned/pseuds/LaurelCrowned
Summary: His granddaughter wanted a shrink ray for her birthday when she was five years old. In a crumbling colony on the other side of the universe, he finally built her one.Outer Worlds AU: Phineas Welles knows the Captain very well, even if she doesn't remember him yet.Incomplete and unfinished due to 2020’s nonsense.
Relationships: The Captain & Phineas Welles
Comments: 25
Kudos: 55





	1. The Shrink Ray

**Author's Note:**

> AU: Phineas Welles is the Captain's grandfather. Timelines and other bits of canon are handwaved to allow the concept. Content warning for canon-level violence and happenings, and spoilers for the entire game.
> 
>  _Incomplete and unfinished due to 2020’s nonsense._ Can be read as a series of connected scenes.

His granddaughter wanted a shrink ray for her birthday when she was five years old. In a crumbling colony on the other side of the universe, he finally built her one.

It was an apology, and as apologies went, it wasn’t a very good one. It was also a waste of resources and time, neither of which he had in abundance. But he had sat too long staring at the half-finished log on his computer terminal, listening to the slow _drip-drip_ of liquid inside the crumpled biohazard bag he’d wrapped around the remains of his latest unlucky _Hope_ colonist. He needed to do a small piece of the impossible, just to remind himself it could be done.

He noted the datestamp on the unfinished log as he saved it. Today was her birthday. Muttering to himself, he went to the workbench and reached for his tools.

Galaxies and years away, she’d been all innocence with big, green eyes. She’d tugged at his lab coat and he’d stripped away his elbow-length gloves covered in toxic chemicals, and gathered her into his arms.

“What do you want for your birthday, pet?” he’d asked her, “A puppy, maybe? A cystypiglet?”

Her older brother was easier: tossball cards and nothing but tossball cards, unless it was a box of spare parts to tinker with the family’s SAM unit. This little one was still a mystery. She was in that nebulous stage of youth before their brains had fully caught on to the consequences of reality and they became truly interesting. His own children had become fascinating to him precisely at the age they could reliably hold a beaker and a conversation about string theory.

This one wasn’t there yet, but she had a baffling ability to talk her way out of any punishment, her parents had told him over coffee in the break room while their experiment data compiled. She liked animals, though she was terrified of praying mantids. Her nose scrunched up when she thought hard, an expression in later years he would come to know well as she donned a white coat herself and joined them in the lab. Their littlest scientist, following the family calling. She was something special, and looking back on it, the moment he’d realized it was when she announced,

“A shrink ray.”

“A what?” He was mildly taken aback. “There’s no such thing as a shrink ray. The matter conversion alone would require...wait. Why do you want a shrink ray?”

She smiled at her grandfather, showing her missing front tooth. “Sometimes, things are too big. I want them to be small.”

“You don’t need a shrink ray for that,” he argued. “You’re still growing. It’s a matter of perspective. Things will look smaller when you’re older.”

“But,” she said, “I want one. Please, grandpa?”

He’d patiently explained why she couldn’t have one. His granddaughter had been skeptical. He broke out the old, dirty chalkboard to draw the formulae for her, going over mass conversion and energy equations and -

And halfway through, frowning over his own handwriting, he realized it might actually be possible.

She’d seen the look on his face. She was frighteningly perceptive. “You can do it, grandpa. You can do anything.”

Anything, he thought bitterly, except rescue her from the _Hope_ without having her die in his arms. Like her mother had, years before, when he’d stolen his daughter’s frozen body from under the Board’s nose and tried to revive her. He’d been so arrogant then, so certain it was all just a matter of thermodynamics. Well, it fucking hadn’t been.

His precious girl had been the first. His nightmares were full of screams now, growing more cacophonous with each failed attempt. But his daughter's cries would always be the loudest.

When he did figure this out, when he could stop butchering the poor souls on the _Hope_ , his granddaughter would have a hard road ahead. He could have chosen any one of his other children or grandchildren for the task. They were all asleep encased in ice together on the derelict colony ship, still unaware of everything that had happened. In his darkest moments he admitted to himself that if he were a kinder man, a less angry man, he would let them sleep in peace, drifting forever lost among the stars. If he were a more cowardly man, he would never have to tell her or her brother that their mother was dead because of his hubris.

The years had whittled away his kindness and sharpened his anger, until the only thing he feared were the dreams. And sometimes the shark’s-smile on Adjutant Akande’s face in the broadcasts, damning him as a murderer.

But this wasn’t about him, and it had to be her. No amount of calculations could explain why he knew it. And when – _when_ , damn it – he freed her, she would wake into danger. A fractured reality bigger and more complicated than any of them had ever expected when they had signed onto the cursed Halcyon project together, as a family. He was old now and a hunted man, and about to foist the weight of worlds onto her shoulders.

He was getting closer to the solution, but he was running out of chemicals, and the Board’s flunkies were closing in. Sooner or later he would have to make the attempt whether or not he was sure it would work. He was grimly aware it would be sooner. Well, he was playing with people’s lives. It was only fair he gambled with those he loved, too.

He didn’t expect her to forgive him. It only mattered now that she was up to the task of succeeding where he failed.

Nearly forty hours later, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, he set the finished shrink ray onto a pedestal. She would see it for the apology that it was, he was sure, though it wasn’t enough. Nothing he could do would ever be enough. But maybe this would help make the impossible problems in her way seem a little smaller.


	2. The Easy Part

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some lines of dialogue are taken directly from the Outer Worlds.

They called it "hibernation," and though most of the promotional materials referred to it as a sort of sleep, in truth it was far closer to death than to dreams.

The cohesion of sciences that developed the method had come from at least a dozen fields: anesthesiology, molecular physics, psychology, and biomechanical engineering just a few among them. Humans had long known there were levels of consciousness, a staircase that a person’s mind could ascend or descend. They did so daily as a matter of the natural rhythms of life.

It was only in the last few centuries of experimentation that they had learned how to coax a mind and body to go deeper and stay there, lingering on the edge of what a few hundred years before would have been considered total brain death. It took the right combination of chemicals, administered in a certain order, and application of a precisely controlled environment. The chambers were sustained by banks of computers that required a level of automation and computation power that even the artificial intelligence community found a little alarming.

The results were spectacular. The technicians could walk a person entering hibernation step by step down that endless spiral until breath stilled, the heart halted, and even the brain’s waves were the barest slow crawl on the most sensitive of monitoring equipment. And then, to ascend unharmed! A more than minor miracle. That part had taken considerably longer to get right. And still, it was imperfect. There were limits. Freeze someone too long, and things went wrong. Lose power or experience a mechanical malfunction, and people died. There were redundancies built into redundancies, but that didn't change the fact that an infestation of wire-chewing sprats in the wrong console could wipe out the lives of thousands.

Yet, the fear many people had about being put into hibernation belonged only to the terrifying moment before the quiet hiss of gas filled the sealed chamber, drowning out and then gently hushing the sound of anxious respiration. And the relief on waking up and having made the journey safely, that was reserved for after. But during?

Hibernation itself was dreamless. There were no nightmares, and no pain. No sense of the passage of time. Time itself could not touch those suspended in the pods, their bodies temporarily ageless as even the telomerase in their cells reluctantly bowed to technological innovation. The colonists on the _Hope_ were outside thought, outside life, helpless and vulnerable. The ultimate expression of trust, giving themselves to the hands of a tiny crew and mountains of machines, all for the sake of building a new future. They brushed against death like a hand outstretched to dance ripples on the surface of a still, empty lake.

Until the lake trembled. 

* * *

He had walked this ship’s corridors enough by now to know exactly where to go. The door that stuck every time he entered did so once again, and he impatiently jammed his finger on the button until the door panel gave up and sluggishly retracted.

“Falling apart, just like everything else in this colony,” he muttered, as he strode down the walkway with the mien of a badly insulted tomcat.

He didn’t bother hiding his face from the security cameras. It didn’t matter anyway. The Board was aware he was the only person who even knew where the _Hope_ was. The watch on his wrist beeped every sixty seconds, counting down the bare minutes he had before their flunkies would arrive and come charging in after him. He had the timing of these excursions down to a science now. (Hah, down to a science.)

The doors opened on the bridge, and the brief moment of humor fled. As always, he pushed through his grief and disgust as he hurriedly hacked into the _Hope_ ’s computer system. The monitor sprang to life, showing images of the vast bays of precious cargo. Artists, doctors, engineers. The finest minds and most skilled hands Earth had to offer, the true hope of Halcyon.

“Hundreds of thousands of colonists left to drift out here forever, just to keep from damaging the Board’s bottom line. Disgraceful,” he snarled, his dry voice heavy with pain and anger. It echoed slightly in the cavernous room. His eyes misted. He was getting sentimental in his old age.

He didn’t have to waste valuable moments searching for a test subject this time. He had long ago memorized the locations of all his family’s hibernation chambers. He could have done this part in his sleep. The mechanisms hummed as he maneuvered his granddaughter’s chamber into his ship. On the monitor, he caught a glimpse of her face behind the frosted glass. His heart clenched. She looked even younger than he remembered.

_I promised you, pet, didn’t I?_

His hands shook at the controls. His two sons and their children were still here. Leaving them behind every time he snuck aboard was one more betrayal added to the ever-growing pile of his sins. But his scrapyard of a laboratory was hardly fit for a child’s science fair baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano, much less equipped for keeping multiple hibernation chambers stable. It was safest for now to leave them here.

“I’ll come back for you,” he swore under his breath, as he always did. Today, it felt less like an empty peace offering than usual.

The old scientist shut down the computer and began the long walk back to his ship, thanking his lucky stars once again for his moment of foresight back on Earth. A certain niggling feeling had caused him to give a fake name and scrub his files when he’d signed on with Halcyon. The murderer known as Phineas Welles was a fabrication as real as mock-apple cider. The colony's records listed him as a scientist, but they knew nothing of the true extent of his talents. Even his contacts were kept in the dark. It was for the best. Plausible deniability.

His last-minute identity swap was also why he’d been assigned to a different transport ship instead of being on the _Hope_ with the others. He’d tried to get himself assigned to the _Hope_ , but by that time his family was already in hibernation and it was accept a different ship or stay behind. Now, he was just grateful there was absolutely no record anywhere this side of the universe that could prove they were related, excepting a DNA test, and he wasn’t so foolish as to leave any trace as to allow that. If the Board ever knew "Phineas Welles"’ family slept here, or even existed, they would all be in terrible danger. 

At least he had his granddaughter back now. And just enough dimethyl sulfoxide to wake her.

Or kill her, like he'd killed her mother.

 _Doing the Board’s job for them, aren’t you, "Phinny"?_ his conscience prodded him gleefully. _Removing unwanted mouths to feed. Maybe they’ll even give you one of those stupid Corporate Awards of theirs for your service. Posthumously, of course._

He would have gone down to the cargo hold and inspected her hibernation chamber if he could have, but as he reached his ship, he could already hear the proximity alarms going off. Damnation, the corporate swine had seen through his distraction faster than he'd calculated. He flung himself into the captain’s chair and punched up the engines. 

“Looks like we’re going to have to make a run for it after all. Don’t worry, my dear, your grandpa’s learned a few new tricks out here.” What would she think to see the famously irascible patriarch like this, bolting to his hidey-hole like a fox fleeing a hound? Dealing with ne’er-do-wells like some hard-bitten spacer from a bad aetherwave drama? Halcyon had changed him, and he hated the Board for it all the more.

Welles took the controls and ordered the computer to calculate the skip. The ship rocked as plasma-fire exploded all around. Metal screamed and the ship bucked wildly, skewing to the side. Alarms blared. He’d been hit.

“Not likely, bootlickers,” he snapped in response to the message they broadcast to him.

The ship skipped. The stars winked. Just as quickly as it had started, the microjump slammed to a halt, the reassuring rocks of the planet’s ring coming into view. His engines groaned in protest, but Phineas slumped against his seat in relief. He’d done it. The easy part was over.


	3. Dimethyl Sulfoxide

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A line of dialogue in this chapter is taken from The Outer Worlds.

It was always cold here in space. As his ailing ship limped into base, the rattling heaters of his hideaway kicked in with a tepid fervor that seemed poised on the brink of total collapse. He liked it that way. It was one piece of familiarity that required no effort on his part to maintain. Laboratories were cold. Morgues were cold. Operating rooms were cold. He’d spent most of his life in one or another. It offered as much a sense of home as anything he was ever likely to get again. His rare trips groundside for supplies, procured through carefully selected third-hand sources, were always shocking in their sudden warmth when he blinked in the non-artificial sunlight.

But it might be uncomfortably cold, to her, after so long in hibernation. He stopped at the environmental controls to argue them into a more alacritous cycle.

The latest version of his “Wanted” poster lay on the floor where it had fallen from the printer attached to the terminal he kept hooked up to monitor communications traffic. He spared it a glance as he entered the room. That was quick. They must have sent it out as soon as he’d triggered the alarms on the _Hope_. He trod on it derisively and returned to poring over the checklist on his datapad. Then he stopped, frowned, and reached down to pick up the slip of paper. They’d added a few new charges to the list.

“‘Practicing medicine without a license’?” he read aloud. The lines on his leonine face wrinkled in deep annoyance. “Those bastards! I didn’t spend six years in medical school to put up with this libel.”

He threw the poster aside and stalked into the lab. Despite his complaining, it was of little consequence that his enemies didn’t know he was a medical doctor. In the face of their other crimes, the slight against him was hardly anything of note. Better that they didn’t know his true past. Even if he hadn’t been actively working against the Board, he wouldn’t have been willing to sell his soul to obtain the license the corporations extorted from the people who passed as “physicians” in the colony. It rankled nonetheless, just another small thorn in the tangled vine of Halcyon that was strangling the life out of humanity.

 _It’s not like you don’t deserve to lose your license anyway,_ the insidious voice informed him merrily. “ _First, do no harm.” Too late for that, Phinny._

He sighed, set aside his datapad, and looked up into the frosted hibernation chamber at the sleeping face of his granddaughter.

Her hair was an outrageous shade of purple. He vaguely recalled her fussing over it in the whirlwind weeks as they packed to leave. She’d wondered aloud whether the hibernation process would leach the dye and whether she might get her cousin, a chemical engineer, to make her a good replacement using native ingredients once supplies of such things were gone on Halcyon.

She didn’t look much like him, perhaps just a similar stubborn cut of their jaw suggesting a relation. She took more after her father than her mother’s side of the family. She lacked her grandfather’s spindly height and what she had once – charitably, he thought – referred to as his distinguished features. She was beautiful, of course she was, she could never be anything else to him; but he could almost swear it was yesterday she'd been just a warm bundle of unfinished fontanelle and milk-breath in his arms, her chubby fingers wrapped in a death grip around the writing stylus she'd snagged out of his pocket with toothless infant joy.

He touched the nameplate on her pod. It had been so long since he’d heard any of his family’s voices. In his memories she was all golden heart and silver tongue, with an eye for catching problems before they could become problems. She had a mind that could cut through the unnecessary like a laser-knife through a cystypig tumor. If things had gone as they should have, he had no doubt she would have grown into a well-known and highly respected scientist like her parents, her academic acumen aided in no small part by her emotional intelligence. Perhaps she might have even outstripped his own considerable accomplishments. 

He was proud of all his grandchildren, but she was...she was like him, with her stubbornness and her patience and her fierce drive, and when he brought her up to speed on the colony’s woes, she was going to be so god-damned _angry_. If there was any faith left to be had in his bony chest, it would live or die with her. If she and the rest of his family had been by his side from the start, perhaps they could have even stopped Halcyon from going to the rapts in the first place.

“If I’d had your brain all these years ago, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess,” he told her.

He overrode the safety controls on the hibernation pod and got to work.

* * *

It was warm, and there was a rattling noise somewhere in the near distance. The hindparts of her brain registered gentle pressure around her, and a certain quiet stillness in her immediate surroundings that lacked threat. Her nose seized on the scents in the air, classifying them as comfortingly familiar before she could put names to them. Rubbing alcohol, solvent, ozone from an air scrubber? Taste returned in a thick, sour bite that made the corners of her mouth jerk down in displeasure. She twitched and drew a heavy breath. Her head hurt. In contrast, her muscles felt loose and muzzy. She blinked and saw a wide blur of grey, then blinked again and raised her head.

She was in some kind of laboratory, lying on a solid table. Scratchy white blankets wrapped her shoulders tightly, as if she’d been swaddled to keep her from moving too much. The lights were too bright, and as she came awake, the scents assailing her nose grew almost overpowering. The sour taste in her throat was perpetually cloying and, some part of her brain dimly suggested, could not be anything but the result of exposure to some type of membrane-permeable gas.

She moved her arms and felt a sharp tug, and looked up blearily to see a series of not one, nor two, nor three – but four containers of pale fluids feeding into her left elbow through a complicated intravenous drip. She watched blankly as it dripped at different speeds into the line that ran into her arm, which was carefully secured with a thick wrap of tape. It didn’t hurt, and so she left it alone. _Ringer’s lactate_ , her mind supplied as she looked at the clear fluid. She recognized two of the others by color alone, but the fourth was a mystery, and for some reason it was that unknowing more than anything else that caused her to struggle to sit up.

She was clothed under the blanket. Her shoes kicked against the metal table as she slowly went vertical. She had to fight down a moment of nausea as a spike of pain flashed behind her eyes. A migraine? Or had she been injured somehow? Her legs trembled to take her weight as she slid off the table, the blankets clutched around her. She was careful as she put one foot in front of the other. If she tripped and fell, she didn’t think she would be able to get back up. 

A sense of unreality pervaded the scene. The world swam at the edges of her vision, as if it wasn’t certain it was real, either. She nearly bumped into a tall metal cylinder near the table where she’d been lying. A hibernation chamber, one of the most advanced models, her brain cheerily supplied. She looked up groggily and saw the nameplate on the outside, then tottered away toward what looked to be a glassed-in office of some sort. 

There was a man slumped over the desk inside, his face obscured and buried in his arms. He wore a lab coat, his hair was heavily greyed, and from the uncomfortable akimbo splay of his limbs, he was unintentionally unconscious. At first her heart squeezed with fear to think perhaps he was dead and she was alone in this strange place. Then something bumped against her legs, warm and large and grunting, and she let out a gasp as she lost her precarious balance and fell. She knocked into a table as she went down. Datapads went flying off the table and clattered to the floor, and the man who’d fallen asleep over his desk leaped to his feet. He had a weapon of some sort in his hand, she noticed distantly, as the world swam and dark particles floated across her vision. 

She should probably be reacting more defensively, but the heavy feeling that draped her body didn’t allow it. Something wasn’t right. _Methocarbamol in the drip_ , her brain reminded her, _useful for nerve pain, indicated in the treatment of_ \- 

-why did she know that? 

The tall man dropped the weapon to the desk with a clatter that made her flinch badly. Too loud. Her senses were frayed and jangled. He knelt down and reached out to her with hands that looked to be trembling. Perhaps it was just her uncertain vision.

“What are you doing up already? You shouldn’t be standing until the last round of medications runs its course,” he scolded her, but there was a look on his face that instantly eased any sting from the sharp words. He was worried, and he was happy. She could read the emotions there like an open book.

He met her eyes, and his craggy face softened. He looked...he looked so old and tired, and when he reached to take her hands in his bony grip, she didn’t protest.

“Oh, pet, I missed you,” he rumbled softly, and a smile teased at the corners of his mouth. The lines on his face crinkled in uncommon ways. He didn’t smile often, she thought, and for some reason it made her sad. Still clasping her hands in one of his own, he lifted the broad palm of his right hand to touch the curve of her cheek. It felt cold against her almost too-warm skin. He gently trailed his fingertips through her hair, and tucked stray strands of royal purple behind her ear.

She smiled back at him because it felt natural to smile, the muscles of her face doing it almost without her permission. But speaking took the effort of civilizations. She had to try twice to get her tongue to work. A touch of worry returned to his expression as he watched her struggle, but he didn’t interrupt, and instead waited patiently until she could form the words.

“Where,” she rasped thickly, looking at the man with her dark green eyes. “Where am I? Who are you?”

He froze, and through the drug-induced haze and the pounding pain in her head, she watched as some terrible shock washed over him. It darkened his eyes first with awful realization, and then struck his thin shoulders like a physical blow. He slumped almost in half with a sigh his narrow body seemed far too frail to generate.

“You don’t remember?” he said carefully, so carefully that the suggestion of all he left unsaid frightened her even through the dulling influence of the chemicals. She’d said something wrong. She hadn’t meant to do that. She only wanted to understand.

“I’m sorry,” she said, each syllable improper and slurred to her own ears. “I don’t…”

Then her loose muscles tightened all at once, and the black spots swarmed her vision. The tall man cursed as the woman collapsed in his arms, her body shaking with a seizure. She was already unconscious again, unable to feel how tenderly he laid her against the floor, or how protectively he held her head until the seizure stopped.

When he was certain it was over and her airway was clear, he sighed deeply and slowly got to his feet. He was deceptively strong for a man his age, and she was not a heavily built person. He managed to lift her, and Bubbles followed, snorting softly at his legs as Phineas returned his granddaughter to the autopsy table he’d vainly tried to mask as a hospital bed. There was blood on her arm from where the seizure had torn out her drip. He carefully replaced it and wiped away each smear of red with soft, clean gauze.

Then he collapsed into a chair next to her, head in his hands, the truth of the situation and what it meant for Halcyon sinking in. Even with the heaters crankily chugging at full power, Phineas felt frozen to his core.

_What have I done?_


	4. The Unplanned Variable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few more lines of dialogue at the end are taken from The Outer Worlds.

It was hours, perhaps a day later. The arrangement of intravenous drips had changed. Now five containers of liquids slowly fed through two lines into his granddaughter’s body. None of them were directly related to the revival process. No, his old enemy _explosive cell death_ was defeated at last. Supportive care only, a mix of medications and hydration fluids to help her body recover from the strain of what she’d been through. Two of them had sedative properties. She wasn’t going to be waking unexpectedly again. He’d added a gabapentin derivative to ward off any further seizures. Successfully, so far. He strongly suspected that the one she’d experienced would prevent her from remembering she’d even woken up at all.

There was no medication or treatment he knew of or could find that would fix a damaged memory. The brain scans he’d run, the tests he’d done showed no hemorrhaging, no clots, no dark sections where neurons failed to transmit. He’d double and triple checked the status log from her hibernation chamber, and found nothing of note. The hibernation process had made her immune to lack of oxygen, so it wasn’t hypoxia. He’d dug through all his own notes, and even turned to his pathetically small collection of texts on pharmacology to try and determine if it was something in the drug cocktail he’d given her that might be responsible for the amnesia. Having never done any of this successfully before, he had no basis for comparison whatsoever. 

In the end he was left with more questions than answers, and a sneaking suspicion it was simply the duration of hibernation to blame. He thought, maybe, just maybe, if he applied certain therapies to the revival process, it could have avoided this. He simply hadn’t thought to stamp out that particular sprat before it bit him. Human brains were so damnably, unspeakably fragile. He couldn’t know if the adjustment would work until he tried, and he couldn’t try again until he got his hands on more dimethyl sulfoxide. Which he also couldn’t do, because his ship was still smoking slightly in the docking bay, and the mechanical fire suppression unit was circling it warily. And the Board had raised the bounty on his head _again_.

He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair, feeling every one of his advanced years. He needed to think critically instead of emotionally. She was alive. He had that much. He clung to it like a lifeline. Yes, she was experiencing memory problems. Yes, that put a serious kink in his plans. Yes, it did imply that waking the rest of the colonists on the _Hope_ might result in similar conditions, completely undermining his hopes that they could restore Halcyon to sanity. Yes, this was going to be much more complicated and dangerous for her than he’d expected even in his most maudlin ponderings.

She was alive. He had to remember that, and be thankful. 

Brains weren’t just fragile. They were resilient. Given time, she might regain her memory on her own. Then with her help, he might even be able to tweak the process further and avoid this outcome for the other colonists. But each day she lay here in chemically-enforced recovery on his little base was one more day Halcyon crumbled further. One more day that the Board could find a weak spot in his carefully concealed network and trace it back to him, and steal her away in the bargain. No. He couldn’t allow that to happen. 

But the alternative plan that was slowly forming in his head was almost too dangerous to contemplate, and he hated himself a little more for even considering it.

“You’ve gone round the bend, you old fool,” he muttered to himself, and reached for the keypad of his message console. 

He had no intention of throwing his amnesiac granddaughter to the canids completely alone, at least. He scowled at the console and punched in a transmission code. Hawthorne was a little shit, but he was slippery as a greased saltuna, well-connected, and he had a working ship. And if he hurt her, Phineas would make him wish for explosive cell death.

“Hawthorne? I have a job for you. No, I don’t care what you’re in the middle of! This is far more important. Just get yourself to Edgewater, activate a homing beacon with this signal” - he transmitted it - “and move away quickly. I’ll be sending down a colleague of mine to take a look at what’s going on in Edgewater. And from there, I want you to-“ 

He rattled off instructions, concluding at the end, “I’ve kept her in the dark on damn near everything until she can form her own opinion. Don’t be surprised if she seems confused or asks you a lot of questions.”

He cut off without another word, and turned to regard his sleeping granddaughter. _I’m sending her straight into a mantiqueen nest, totally unprepared._ What if she didn’t draw the same conclusions he had? What if she let the Board’s propaganda get to her? 

No. No, he shouldn’t look at it like that. She was that rarest of things: a fresh pair of eyes, untainted by opinion or experience, and… he sat up in his chair at the realization. And not even colored by her association with him. If she didn’t know their relationship, she wouldn’t take stupid risks to protect him or their family, or base her judgement and decisions on doing what she believed he might want her to do. She could be an unplanned variable. 

And yet, he knew her. And yet, he trusted her. Memory was one thing. Character was another. She was who she was, and he had to believe in her ability to help set things right.

He was not infallible, much as his younger self had believed otherwise. The record of his failures was as simple yet extensive as the list of names of colonists he’d butchered. Perhaps her amnesia was an opportunity for finding solutions he would never have seen, and without the specter of all he’d done hanging over her.

That meant, of course, he couldn’t tell her. Not who she was to him, or that their family was counting on her, or that he’d...he’d killed her mother. Let him continue to bear the burden of that knowledge alone for now, leaving her untouched by grief just a little longer. ( _Coward.)_ If she recovered her memory on her own, fine. Excellent. Until then?

Until then he would be Phineas Welles, the dangerous, outcast mad scientist who played fast and loose with the rules. Who despised tyranny solely out of principle, rather than a mix of humanitarianism _and_ a hefty dose of personal vendetta. Who would speak barely a few dozen words to a complete stranger, before sealing her in an escape pod and jettisoning her to Terra 2 with an impossible task before her. 

He shook his head slowly. This wasn’t just dangerous. It was unforgivably cruel. She would be right to never speak to him again, once she knew. At the end of this, he might be as alone as he’d felt in those terrible years when he’d thought the _Hope_ truly lost, and his family dead. And he would deserve it all. 

But if it made a difference to the hundreds of thousands of lives at stake, he could carry that a little longer. He was an old man. It wouldn’t be long. 

He stood and walked to her bedside, and watched her sleeping peacefully, a sad smile fixed on his face. He turned away at last and picked up his tools. They had a twelve-hour window before Hawthorne was due to arrive. He left her to sleep and recover just a little longer, and went to tinker with the secure communication device he’d been working on. Just because she was going without him didn’t mean he couldn’t at least check in on her. 

* * *

She woke up held in place by the safety harness of some kind of small, single-person pod. She felt disoriented, with no memory of how she came to be there. The room beyond was dark, and cascades of sparks showered down from a damaged system. As sensation returned and she slowly flexed her fingers and toes, she realized she didn’t feel bad, exactly. There was no pain, and if her limbs were a bit stiff, perhaps she’d only slept too long. And she wasn’t alone.

“Ah, there you are,” someone said, and she blinked to full awareness to see a grey-haired man in a lab coat using a tool to adjust something beyond her range of vision. 

“Wondering what’s going on, eh? A bit of bad news there, I’m afraid.”

He closed the escape pod door between them with a bone-rattling slam.


	5. Beta lupus familiari

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Something of a shakeup in tone as we switch perspectives, and further departures from the exact events of the game.

Her brain was broken, but at least it was broken in an interesting way. Admittedly she was still swinging back and forth between roughly equal parts horror and fascination about it. At the moment, surrounded by the still-warm corpses of several alien creatures, a likewise still-warm pistol in her hand, fascination was winning out. 

“Wow, Captain. I never saw anybody move like that before. It was like you were moving faster than I could follow, for a second.” The cute girl named Parvati sounded awed. 

“Alex Hawthorne” nudged one of the corpses with the side of her foot, radiating regret. 

“You’re sure they were feral?” she asked again, “I didn’t just blow someone’s poor pet whatever-this-is to pieces, did I?” If she sounded pained it was because she was, in fact, pained. The fan-headed things were kind of cute. She wanted one.

“Oh I’m plenty sure. The tame ones, they're nice pets. Not that anybody I know's got one. They eat a lot. But they only come after you if someone sets them on you.”

“Uh-huh. And you called them canids?” That was outright baffling. She wasn’t sure they were even mammalian, much less canine. Cystypigs might be bioengineered but they were, at some base level, still pigs. The “canids” were entirely alien.

Because they were literally alien fauna. Because she was actually standing on an alien planet, complete with rings that created an amazing skyline.

Once she got over the brain-brokenness, she was going to have a well-deserved meltdown over someone’s pernicious misunderstanding of taxonomy. It was one of a growing number of breakdowns she was hoarding like a squirrel collecting acorns for winter. It began with one called “I accidentally murdered a man and stole his spaceship,” and had only gotten worse from there.

In her defense, the shocks had just kept coming in a conga line of awfulness.

_“You’re telling me that no one here eats anything but canned fish? Not a single vegetable? Not even an onion?_ _Anything in the_ alium _genus! Are - no. I don’t think I’m ready to ask. Do not under any circumstances tell me you don’t have garlic.”_

_“Oh. Okay, but, what’s garlic?”_

_“...That’s what I was afraid of.”_

_“What do you mean, gravesite fees?”_

_“What do you mean, you want me to shut off their power?!”_

Alex had stormed out of the cannery after the meeting with Reed Tobson.

“Hell world!” she announced with a sweep of her arms. “Come on, Parvati. I bought some ammunition. We’re going to see if that cache of experimental medication is still sitting there. At least then maybe I can do something useful around here.”

And so they were out on the road, the pair of them, looking for an abandoned community center. When the canids attacked, the weird time dilation thing had happened again just like it had before. Because her brain was broken from an over-long stay in hibernation, the scientist guy had told her.

Her memory of her life pre-hibernation might have been shoddy, but the introduction to the Emerald Vale had been more than memorable enough to make up for it. So far she’d recruited a local - or possibly adopted a local, with Parvati it was hard to tell for sure - and started to get her bearings. Ethical dilemmas aside, she had a possible trace on where to get the part needed to fix her ship. Along the way she was going to help solve a few of the more immediate issues Edgewater was having, if she could. Progress. Baby steps. 

That was about all she could manage at the moment. That and the strange, out-of-nowhere flashes of insight that kept popping into her brain seemingly at random. She couldn’t even remember her own real name, but she had somehow known that the “plague” afflicting Edgewater was not behaving like a plague usually did, and that Martin Abernathy wasn't any less healthy than the rest of Edgewater's perpetually half-starved citizens.

Also, she had super powers now. She certainly couldn’t have picked up a gun and shot with that sort of careful aiming on her own. Outside of the time dilation effect, she missed four shots out of five. The weapon felt heavy and awkward in her grip, completely at odds with the way she’d felt while applying medication to the injured soldier. That had seemed reassuringly familiar. Whoever pre-Alex Hawthorne was, she must have known a lot about science, but she hadn’t been much in the habit of shooting things. In her present circumstances, Alex wasn’t sure whether that was for the best or not.

“It’s not the best choice, it’s _Spacer’s Choice!_ ” she hummed under her breath as they resumed their trek through the alien landscape. The tune that injured soldier had groaned at her was a murderous earworm. It was everywhere. There was no escaping it. It couldn’t have been better viral marketing if it had been an actual virus.

(She should probably keep that idea to herself. Some of these corporate types might try and hire her if they caught her coming up with ideas like that.)

They continued on, avoiding a few more canids here and there. All was going well until they crested a bend in the road and nearly ran straight into the marauders camped there. Alex pounced on Parvati and dragged her into the tall, red grass for a quick conversation.

“I am not shooting _people_ _!_ Who are they, anyway?” she hissed. She’d seen people dressed like that before. They’d been the ones who’d shot that kid she’d met back in the cavern.

“Marauders are folks who didn’t want to, or couldn’t work in the cities any more. So they came out here.” Parvati looked nearly as frightened as she felt, crouching low with her big eyes wide as saucers. Alex reminded herself that “local” didn’t mean “experienced.” 

“They’re trouble, Captain. They don't care about hurting folks or destroying property. They do a lot of bad things.”

And what would she do in their position? Not even onions, for the love of - 

She rubbed the bridge of her nose. Then she whispered, “Stay here,” and vanished into the next patch of waving grass. Parvati felt relieved; surely the Captain would come up with a plan to get them around the marauders.

From her hiding place, she heard the sound of plasma weapon cells charging. The Captain’s cheery voice rang out. “Hey, guys! Fancy meeting you here. I come in peace. Take me to your leader.” 

Parvati risked a peek above the waving grass. Or, Alex could just walk straight into their midst, drop her weapon, hold her arms up in surrender, and immediately be swarmed by marauders. 

_Maybe I shoulda stayed on at the cannery_.


	6. Purpleberry Crunch(tm)

“And then they made me their queen,” Alex deadpanned to Welles over the staticky channel. On the display next to the screen, ADA rolled her eyes. Welles himself harrumphed with a noise that sounded suspiciously like someone covering a laugh.

Parvati yanked too hard on the bandage she was wrapping around the Captain’s arm, and Hawthorne winced. “Not quite so tight, please? - There, that’s better.” She tentatively flexed her arm, then reached up and ran her hands through her purple hair. She was tired.

“What really happened?” Welles asked, very patiently. She shrugged, as if walking into almost certain death was something she did every day. In all fairness to her faulty memory, maybe it was. Judging by how shaky she still felt, though...probably not.

“They roughed me up a little, stole my weapon and supplies, and then I sweet talked them into not killing me. I helped one of them patch up her wounded canid. Then they threw me into the abandoned house they were using as a base, and locked me in.”

Alex turned a brilliant smile on Parvati, who kept casting wary looks at Welles as if she expected him to leap through the screen at her.

“My excellent engineer friend here waited until they were out on patrol, snuck in, picked the lock, and got me out.” She winked at Parvati. The young woman flushed as she put away the rest of the medical kit Alex had found stashed in a cupboard.

“Well, thank the stars for clever engineers. So you got yourself injured and lost your supplies?” If Welles’ eyebrows were fuzzy caterpillars, it would’ve been a bad winter, judging by how quickly the bushy things crawled up his forehead. 

“Hold on, I’m not finished!” Alex protested. “Then, because she’s awesome, Parvati hacked into the marauders’ stores and we got our stuff back. Then we stole some of _their_ shit. Look at this thing! I’m pretty sure it’s a flamethrower.”

She hefted the clunky metal device up onto her hip to show it off. Welles looked like he’d just bitten into a lemon. Which, come to think of it, how the hell was Edgewater staving off scurvy anyway? (She suspected the answer was, they weren’t.)

“And better yet, I found some information on the guy who’s sort of their actual leader. Not that they seem to care much for organization on the whole, apparently. I’m hoping I can track him down and win him over anyway. From what I could see, the lot of them looked to be in pretty bad shape. I don't think they're doing better than scraping by. Maybe if we can work out some kind of deal, they can trade protection services for food instead of attacking travelers at random, and without having to live under corporate rule.”

She kept her tone light, but it bothered her more than she had the energy to express that people had been forced to resort to literal highway robbery in Halcyon just to carve out a life outside the harsh demands of the corporations. That was the sort of dark history from Earth’s past she’d never thought to see in the new colony. 

As she saw it, the marauders were like a fever: a symptom of the illness, but not the cause, and potentially useful in fighting the infection. Bringing them down might be helpful in the short term, but less effective in the long run. Even after just a few days on Terra 2, Alex could already see things were complicated enough to give an ethnographer a complex. Or a PhD, whichever came first.

Welles seemed surprised, and then he settled his face into the carefully guarded look she was coming to understand meant he was about to cut a conversation short. “Good luck with that. And, do try to be more careful?”

Sure enough, he cut the communication channel. Behind her, Parvati visibly relaxed. Alex turned, amused, to see her very first crewmember had been trying to hide in her shadow. In a sudden upwelling of compassion, or perhaps a bout of low blood sugar, she turned and threw her arms around Parvati in a hug. 

“Best engineer the _Unreliable_ ’s ever seen,” she giddily declared. “No offense to the real Hawthorne, ADA.” 

Parvati tensed, then leaned into the hug. She slowly, tentatively put her arms around the Captain. Alex wondered how long it had been since anyone had shown the woman any scrap of kindness or simple friendly touch, and decided she didn’t want to know, because she was too exhausted to go burn down any buildings tonight. Also, her new flamethrower didn’t have any fuel. 

Parvati pulled away and seemed to be trying to get up the nerve to say something. Alex tilted her head.

“So, today didn’t go all that well. I’m sorry I dragged you into this mess, and I really am grateful for your help. Do you want to talk about it?” she asked gently.

The engineer blinked, and then said uncertainly, “It’s just, I hadn’t thought about it like you said it, earlier. That those folks, they’re trying to get by, too. But, even if they are, they’re still wrong, doing what they’re doing. What about the people they hurt? Don’t they matter, too?”

She had a point. You couldn’t turn around in this place without stepping in another moral quandary. It was everywhere, just like that damned jingle. _It’s not the best choice, it’s Spacer’s Choice!_ her brain sang at her for the fifteenth time that day. 

Hawthorne sighed and rubbed her gritty eyes. “Yeah, of course they do. Parvati, thanks, because I need to hear things like that. The longer I’m here, the more I keep talking to people like Reed Tobson, the more it seems like these corporations are...are self-perpetuating machines, eating and eating people from the inside out, and the angrier I get. There’s got to be medical supplies somewhere in this colony, but there’s a graveyard full of people who died because somebody who had the power to decide, thought they weren’t _worth_ helping.”

Too late, she remembered Parvati’s father was also in that graveyard, and mentally kicked herself for being insensitive. But the young woman only seemed thoughtful. 

“Living like that can drive you crazy. I can’t blame one group of people more than another for doing what they can to stay alive in conditions like these,” Hawthorne concluded. “But - there’s got to be a better way than preying on each other. I want to help find one. And if we can’t find one, we’ll make one. But doing that means doing things differently than before. You can’t get somewhere new unless you’re willing to try taking a different road.”

Parvati didn’t look entirely convinced, which was fair, because they’d known each other all of 72 hours and Alex had spent a considerable amount of that time butting heads with the only way of life Parvati had ever known. The rest, she’d spent bloodied and bruised and locked in a run-down shack. But the engineer had a big heart, worn on her sleeve for the world to see, and Alex respected her for it at least as much as she respected her mechanical talents.

Eventually, Parvati nodded. 

“I hope we can drop in and see the Vicar before we go out to Adelaide’s place,” she said a little dubiously, and Hawthorne gave her the most reassuring smile she could manage.

“We will, I promise. We’ll swing by after we get the experimental anthrocillin, okay? But, tomorrow. I don’t know about you, but I’m beat. It’s not every day I get my life saved by my first and only friend on Terra 2.”

Parvati rewarded her with a shy smile and ducked out of the cockpit.

“I don’t know about only friend. I think Silas was awful glad for your help yesterday. Are you hungry, Captain? I’m pretty sure I saw some Purpleberry Crunch(™) in that crate we took. I haven’t had any of that stuff since I was a kid.”

Alex’s stomach rumbled in preemptive protest, but she followed behind Parvati, leaving ADA to keep an eye on things. She slung her arm companionably around the woman’s shoulders as they made for the Unreliable’s kitchen. Rule number two of her stolen spaceship: starvation might be a real risk, but touch starvation was not allowed.

Rule number one, she’d decided, was _fuck the Board_.

“Fun fact, ‘purple’ is not a type of berry,” she said dryly, but relented as Parvati shoved a package of the stuff into her hands. 

* * *

As the screen faded, Phineas sat back in his chair. He steepled his fingers together, still staring at the place his granddaughter’s face had been a few seconds ago. 

“A flamethrower,” he said aloud, the words echoing in his freezing cold secret laboratory. 

Then he burst out laughing in great, dry chuckles of disbelief. Bubbles snorted and nuzzled at his knees in apparent worry. He reached down and patted her. 

“She’s going to like you, you know. She loves animals,” he told her. 

When Welles finally stood up and went back to work, he was still smiling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a game so typically accepting of the grey shades of ethics, it was weird you had no choice but to engage in either violence or stealth with the marauders. My "Alex Hawthorne" is not bound by programming choices, and I am not bound by canon. 
> 
> Thanks, readers, for all your kudos and comments!  
> (The sharp-eyed among you might catch a brief reference in this chapter to another excellent video game I've been enjoying a lot recently.)


End file.
